In recent years, the digital media marketplace has been ever expanding. For example, more and more content is migrating from traditional mechanisms to be digitally generated, electronically distributed and rendered in a variety of mechanisms. With this known, there are many trends in the market place today.
For example, while most Tier 1 content is generated by content creators such as movie studios and record labels, more and more content is generated by individuals. For this reason, better tooling and content creation environments are increasingly becoming commoditized, putting these creation capabilities in the hands of individuals. But, while Tier 1 content creators have worked hard to spend significant money on infrastructure to traditionally and digitally distribute the content, the Internet is, itself, now permitting individuals to play a more significant role in the distribution of content. In fact, peer to peer content sharing mechanisms have become commonplace, becoming the single biggest consumer of Internet bandwidth globally.
While the Tier 1 content creators, aggregators, and distributors and device manufacturers all want to restrict where and how the content is rendered (so that they can then work towards maximizing their portion of the revenue), individuals want control over where and how they view the content of their choice. For this reason, individuals are creating their own content and using peer to peer content sharing mechanisms to distribute such content. However, the sharing of content becomes very difficult, if not impossible, with competing and incompatible communication protocols, media formats, different standards for media conversion and content delivery mechanisms.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.